STORYTELLING

STORYTELLING:

INTRODUCTION:

 This story is about a crocodile who doesn´t like water. He feels sad because all of his brothers and sisters like to swim and stay in the water all day but he doesn´t. What he likes is climbing trees. But what he doesn´t know is that what makes him different makes him special, and that he might not like water for one main reason: he is not a crocodile! He breaths fire and he can fly... What can he be?

ILLUSTRATIONS:

This book has colourful and attractive illustrations that help children develop visual literacy and makes it easier for them to understand what is going on in the story providing comprehensible input through the images.

MOTIVATION:

It is an emotive story that can be motivating for them to hear because it is a story in which the characters are crocodiles and a dragon and those are two of the things children like so this makes the story attractive for the pupils.

Children can identify themselves with the main character because it is a story that can be related to their personal experiences. This makes them pay more attention, empathize with the little dragon and this way they will get more involved with the story, they will pay attention to it and it will make them build a positive attitude towards the second language without them even realising it.

As they are going to connect themselves or someone from their close circle to the protagonist, by finding the solution to the dragons problem, by understanding the story and by wondering about what is happening they will gain confidence and they will feel comfortable to speak and express their feelings and opinions. Because it is always easier to talk about something out of our personal experiences.

VALUES:

The moral of the story teaches children the importance of being themselves and trying to find their interests in life, their abilities and what they are capable of and good at.

It makes children think and by giving it a good use the teacher through the book can make them think of what makes them unique, which qualities they have and how can that be compatible with others. The teacher can also make them realise that no one likes to feel alone and that everything is more fun if you do it with someone.

Other value that appear in this book is  not being afraid of being different from others because that differences might make you feel sad sometimes but at the end you and everyone else are going to realise that what makes you different makes you special too, and everyone likes someone that is different from the rest and that stands out.

If the teacher plays well her/his cards the story can encourage children creativity by letting them predict, create hypothesis and even by asking them to do some activities that has to do with the story and that makes them used their creative skills.

LANGUAGE / CONTENT:

The language used is authentic, easy to understand, with repetitions and with non-hard structures that offer children a rich experience of language without being too hard to understand. Especially because they are going to be familiar with most of the key words that appear in the story and those that are new for them can be teached to them before reading the story or they can even guess the meaning through the context. This way you can also work with the vocabulary and practice it. There are a lot of key words that are repeated several times in the text such as “crocodile” “water” and others such as “swim ring” or “ladder” that they can learn from the story.

It´s a book that as I said before gives you the possibility of creating learning strategies such as hypothesising and predicting.

In addition to be able to understand all the story they have to use their memories to remember what happened before in order for them to understand the ending.

The story only has the dragon and his brothers and sisters as characters so this makes it easier for the children to understand what is going on and not to be confuse. It also makes them focus their attention in one or two things instead of having to focus on a lot of details.

THE TEACHER:

This book was a birthday present from a friend and she couldn’t have been more accurate choosing this book for me. I love the story, the moral of it and also the illustrations. It’s a moving, affectionate and funny book that invites you to read it and to enjoy every single page of it. I think that as I love the story I am going to be able to transmit the feelings that I had while reading it.

One thing that I loved the most was the fact that when the story ends, in the last page a dragon reading a book appears. And the dragon have eggs and the name of the book the dragon is reading is “the dragon who didn´t like fire”. It´s like an opening for another similar story in which the little dragon is an adult now and is going to have babies and he wonders “what if one of my babies doesn´t like fire!”